No human being noticed his presence.  A small brown bird, much like the snowbird of his own land, hopped near, detected the human presence and then hopped deliberately away.  Nobody was in the snowy fields.  They were within range of the great German guns, and the peasants were gone.  Had John been willing to search longer he could easily have found an abandoned house for shelter.  As he had made mental notes before, Europe was now full of abandoned houses.  In some regions rents must be extraordinarily low.

While he slept, firing was resumed at points on the long double line.  Rifles flashed, and incautious heads or hands were struck, and somewhere or other the cannon were always muttering.  But it was all in the day’s work.  Months of it had made his whole system physical and mental so used to it that it did not awaken him now.

Nevertheless the hosts of the air were uncommonly active while he slept.  The wireless, sputtering and crackling, was carrying the news from general to general that a smart little action had been fought at Chastel, where another smart little action had been fought not long before, that the Germans had been overly daring and had paid for it.

Yet it was only an incident on a gigantic battle front that extended its mighty curving line from Switzerland to the sea, and soon the wireless and its older brother the telephone, and its oldest brother the telegraph, talked of other plans which would cause a much greater slaughter than at Chastel.  Chastel itself, unless its beautiful Gothic cathedral brooding unharmed over the ruins could win it a word or two, would have no place at all in history.  John himself was only one among eight or ten million armed men, and not a single one of all those millions knew that he lay there in the snow under the hedge.

The aeroplanes came out in the clear frosty blue, and both German and French machines sauntered lazily up and down the air lanes, but they did not risk encounters with one another.  They were scouting with powerful glasses, or directing the fire of the batteries.  One French machine circled directly over John, not more than two or three hundred feet away, but the man in it, keen of eye though he was, did not dream that one of the bravest of the Strangers lay asleep under the hedge beneath him.

The fleets of flyers were larger than usual, as if they were anxious to take the fresh air, after days of storm.  But the most daring and skillful of all the airmen, Philip Lannes, was not there.  He still lay in a hospital a hundred miles to the west, with a bullet wound in his shoulder, and while the time was to come when the Arrow under his practiced hand would once more be queen of the heavens, it was yet many days away.

The sun rose higher, suffusing the frosty blue heavens with a luminous golden glow, but John slept heavily on.  He had not known how near to exhaustion was his nervous system.  Perhaps it was less physical exhaustion than emotion, which can make huge drains upon the system.  Now he was in the keeping of nature which was restoring all his powers of both mind and body, and keeping him there until he should again have all his strength and all the keenness of his faculties, needful for the great work that lay before him.